It'd be interesting to somehow compare the average hashrate to the pool payouts. See if there are any pools that are consistently paying out less than the others with regards to a payout/hashrate ratio.

I suppose it would require a miner to be pointed at each pool, and assume all else being equal.

It'd be interesting to somehow compare the average hashrate to the pool payouts. See if there are any pools that are consistently paying out less than the others with regards to a payout/hashrate ratio.

I suppose it would require a miner to be pointed at each pool, and assume all else being equal.

Doesn't require mining, only a calculator, provided the pools post enough stats to make calculations.

It'd be interesting to somehow compare the average hashrate to the pool payouts. See if there are any pools that are consistently paying out less than the others with regards to a payout/hashrate ratio.

I suppose it would require a miner to be pointed at each pool, and assume all else being equal.

Doesn't require mining, only a calculator, provided the pools post enough stats to make calculations.

Eclipse has a 12% better payout currently over Ozcoin, while Eligius doesn't publish, that I could find, average shares round.

{Pools total mega hashes} * 86,400 / 4294.967296 * nPPS / {Pools total Gigahashes} = ⊅BTC per GH/s per daynPPS can be any reasonable arbitrary value, .00003 can be used. It won't represent actual payouts just differences between pools.

But isn't the pool hashrate estimated based on the number of shares? Couldn't the pool misrepresent the number of shares? Or the payout per block? Or etc, etc, etc?

I think there's a lot of wiggle room for pools to potentially skim or scrap coins off the top without anyone noticing. That's why I'd be interested in a direct comparison on the same hardware between 10 of the most popular pools.

The easiest way to do something like you suggest that's also hard to detect is to simply keep round rewards for very short rounds.

Even if you're blatant about recording abnormal round lengths - like bitclockers, although I'm not saying they stole any round rewards, just faked rounds lengths - it will take a while to record enough data to prove it unless you're deepbit.

If you go to the Neighbourhood poolwatch blog (see my sig) there's more info about these types of problem.

But isn't the pool hashrate estimated based on the number of shares? Couldn't the pool misrepresent the number of shares? Or the payout per block? Or etc, etc, etc?

I think there's a lot of wiggle room for pools to potentially skim or scrap coins off the top without anyone noticing. That's why I'd be interested in a direct comparison on the same hardware between 10 of the most popular pools.

I expect the hashes per second displayed by a pool to be honest numbers.If a pool advertises 500 GH/s, I would expect 500 * 1 GH/s rigs are mining at that pool, for example.Calculating hashing power any other way is deceptive because the value is altered to appear other than it is.

Also, it's easy to record the number of shares you submitted locally. If your valid shares minus your stale/invalid shares don't add up to the number of shares you're credited with, or if your stales (as recorded on the pool website) are much higher than you record locally, you'll move to another pool.

It's easier just to credit miners with shares correctly, and just fake round lengths. Or just take the whole reward for short blocks. Neither of these scams work on PPS pools of course - for PPS you just have to keep your eye on submitted vs accepted shares and on your stale/invalid share to valid share ratio.

Also won't work at Slush's pool since you don't get to know your accepted shares, and I'm not sure if you can back calculate from the score since it get normalised hourly - that is intraround sometimes. Lucky Slush is a trustworthy guy.